Intel Multi-Core CPU Tech-Demos (DX11 and DX9) With Source Code

Very cool, Intel has published two new tech-demos with binaries and source code! Both demos use Direct3D (Colony is a D3D10 app and Fireflies exploits the D3D9 API). Okay do not look at the graphics rendering, this is not Intel’s strenght… These demos are rather focused on the good use of multi-core CPUs with Intel TBB (Threading Building Blocks).

Colony – A highly parallel crowd simulation technique

Colony is a highly parallel optimized crowd simulation technique. Tens of thousands of units are simulated using a novel ray-casting technique. This is achieved by utilizing TBB to distribute our work across multiple threads and multiple frames and utilizing SIMD to ensure further instruction-level parallelism.

Fireflies – Scalable Ambient Effects

Fireflies is a tech sample demonstrating a scalable ambient effect. In this sample, the ambient effect is a swarm of fireflies that scatter and reform into a walking character. Using Intel TBB, the firefly flight trajectory calculations performed per frame are distributed across multiple threads. By changing the number of simulated fireflies programmatically the ambient effect can be scaled to better match the performance of the platform it is running on.

Looks like someone compiled the binary versions with the _debug_ libraries of D3DX

Anyway, as a workaround (besides having latest DX SDK installed) is go find D3DX9_43.dll & d3dx11_43.dll in your Windows system folders (under SysWOW64 if using x64 Windows) and copy them in the Firfelies’ executable folder, and rename them to D3DX9d_43.dll & d3dx11d_43.dll respectively.
Nice demo. Really beautiful, and it’s really neat to see 500.000 at 60fps in my machine 😉

Not the point of the demo, but I wonder how the walking fireman would look with HDR on, using a Gaussian filter with big radius.

I just got word that our engineers have finished building and testing a fix to the problem you highlighted. We’ll be uploading new source code for Fireflies very soon. Thanks for bringing this to our attention and helping direct others to a good work around!